I Once Was

Two groups of people, maligned and sometimes despised. Two groups of people live and exist amongst us in the cities we have created to feed our enterprise. We try our best not to see them, for they remind us of our failures and mistakes, the thin line that divides us from their fate. To see them is to remember that they, too, have feelings, just as we do. They have stories to tell, just as we do. Out of one such story, we find a boy - a boy born out of his time, blessed with an irrepressible spirit and keen intelligence, streetwise and independent of nature. He forms an unlikely relationship with a vagrant who seems to be much more than he appears - a mysterious and enigmatic man who struggles with the loss of his memory, a memory which he glimpses only through powerful, disturbing dreams with bewildering mythological themes. Many think of him as simply a madman. Their story is strange and unbelievable, and it is picked up and followed reluctantly by two Christian volunteers whose views of the accepted are irretrievably changed by their experiences. Do the old gods still live among us? Do we dare look into those hidden corners we scurry by? We may find their immortal gaze staring back, examining our souls, forcing us to remember what we once were.

With a long journey of years and distance behind him, the author decided to follow his heart. He turned his hand again to what he loved most and brought him solace and joy in his youth - books. With his son grown and a new family around him, he graduated from reading into writing - an unimaginable step. His first attempt was 'A Place to Belong To'. He has just completed and published number nine, 'Dying Under an Empty Blue Sky', a dystopian novel about the last remnants of humanity hanging on after the fall due to the Climate Crisis. Have we learnt anything from our misguided priorities? Will we survive or fade away from a world that has already dismissed us? We live through the stories we create. Let's hope we can learn from them. The future remains unwritten.